Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
I wrote
The Secret Lives of Planets: Order, Chaos, and Uniqueness in the Solar System
The novel is about Ellie Arroway, a radio astronomer (played by Jody Foster in the movie of the book), who finds radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. They contain instructions to make a vehicle, by which she travels through wormholes to understand the nature of the Universe. The author, planetologist Carl Sagan, based Arroway on Jill Tarter, director of the real-life institute to Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). “Carl Sagan wrote a book about a woman who does what I do, not about me,” explained Tarter. “He did his homework, and thus included many of the ‘character-building’ experiences that are common to women scientists studying and working in a male-dominated profession, so [she] seems very familiar to me.” Sagan links Arroway’s/Tarter’s story with the way that ETs might make themselves known to us, and what we might learn from them.
Caroline Herschel was the sister of William Herschel, a church organist and piano tutor, latterly the discoverer of the planet Uranus, a mapper of the skies, and an astronomer at the court of King George III. At first, she devoted herself to her brother, acting as his housekeeper, musical accompanist, and PA in Bath and then as his scientific assistant in Slough, near Windsor Castle. She submerged her own volition to his. But gradually she found her own life in astronomy, and discovered 8 comets, pooh-poohed as small by the King but much appreciated by Queen Charlotte and her ladies. She became known internationally in her own right. She lived to a considerable old age in Hannover, where she was born. The book is a fictionalised but real-life story that echoes between the eighteenth century and our own time.
This is a story of love and astronomy; music and silence; secrets and truth-telling; of world-changing discoveries, and unrequited desire. Moving from York in the 1780s to Regency Bath, and then to Hanover in the 1840s, it concerns the lives of three people-all astronomers. There is Caroline, torn between her passion for music and her passion for the stars; John, deaf from childhood, whose extraordinary mathematical gifts afford him perspectives not available to others; and Edward, friend and mentor to Caroline and to John, who must conceal his innermost feelings from them both. All three find fulfilment in the heavens…
Scottish astronomer and novelist Pippa Goldschmidt mixes astronomy and fiction in her novel. The book provides insight into the way that astronomy is carried out now in modern, remote, mountain-top observatories and in space (I can vouch for its verisimilitude). Jeanette is a young, lonely, junior researcher working in a university department dominated by male egos and incompetents. She puts academic politics and unsatisfactory affairs aside and travels to a mountain-top observatory in Chile for her research, making an unexpected discovery that throws her into conflict with her colleagues. Like her love life, her scientific life spirals out of her control: the Universe is ordered by science but her life and the lives of scientists are not.
A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative
Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific…
In this Wessex novel by Thomas Hardy, Lady Constantine’s explorer-husband has been missing for years when she offers patronage to the Byronic astronomer, Swithin St. Cleeve, letting him use a tower on her estate as an observatory. He shows her the stars through his telescope, passionately explaining what lies behind the astronomical images. Presuming her husband dead, she secretly marries St Cleeve, but a complicated legacy intrudes, and it transpires that her husband has been living with an African princess before blowing his head off. Suicide, bigamy, a lost legacy, an illegitimate child, the plot lines (there are many more than I have mentioned!) are resolved by numerous and dramatic deaths. This scandalous romance is melodramatically plotted, but gains a certain sublime power as an “emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe".
TWO ON A TOWER (1882) is a tale of star-crossed love in which Hardy sets the emotional lives of his two lovers against the background of the stellar universe. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart. This is Hardy's most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide and the fullest expression of his fascination…
Fay Weldon’s novels are plotted like my book Secret Lives of Planets: a sequence of chance and disconnected events which nevertheless form a biography. In this novel, Sandra Harris, known to her TV fans as "Starlady Sandra”, an astronomer (famous for her discovery of the new planet Athena), and a “professional searcher after truth”, leaves her inadequate husband and runs off with her jazz-playing lover to the south of France. She is pursued by her husband, her lover’s wife, and paparazzi. “She’s always seeing things“, her friends say: new planets, her Nazi war-criminal eugenicist father, her insane mother, other people. Human lives are a farce, like the accidental events of cosmology.
Starlady Sandra is a woman devoted to her own desires. Discoverer of the planet Athena, television astronomer and wife to a humourless barrister she finds Jack, the sax player, irresistable. Sandra gives up everything to follow Jack and his caravan of musicians to France.
The subtitle of my book is Order, Chaos and Uniqueness in the Solar System. It contrasts the conventional idea that the planets are locked into a perfect, repetitive, interlocking mechanical machine like a watch with the increasing realisation by astronomers of the strong role that chance and chaos have played in the way planets develop.
I wrote the book with the thought in mind that the evolution of a planet was akin to someone’s life – a sequence of chance events linked by the progression that, in retrospect, makes the arc of an individual’s biography. In the solar system, the major chance event was an orbital interference of Jupiter and Saturn. It threw asteroids all around the solar system, smashing into the Earth and creating our satellite, scarring rocky worlds like Mercury and the Moon with craters, and ejecting countless asteroids, even planets, into the cold, dark depths of interstellar space. That was a fate that our Earth evidently avoided, but only by chance.
As an American widow flush with cash, she has hopes of finding the burning, passionate love she never experienced in her marriage. But instead, she found The Ladies Alpine Society, and is now pressed into planning a fundraising ball with the expedition’s accountant, Leo Moon. Prudence feels out of her depth, but glad to have a partner-in-crime to help her navigate British culture. But the taciturn Mr. Moon doesn’t like her—or does he like her too much?
Prudence Cabot sailed to Europe to find a lover.. As an American widow flush with cash, she has hopes of finding the burning, passionate love she never experienced in her marriage. But instead, she found The Ladies Alpine Society, and is now pressed into planning a fundraising ball with the expedition’s accountant, Leo Moon. Prudence feels out of her depth, but glad to have a partner-in-crime to help her navigate British culture. But the taciturn Mr. Moon doesn’t like her—or does he like her too much?. One look and she saw right through him.. Leo Moon is not his real…
